Welcome to the weird world of sport

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Dutch millionaires, professional kiss-and-tell girls, crazed
sports stars, a disenchanted wife and a foul-mouthed, lascivious
business partner - it's a peculiar setting for exploring morality,
honour, sexual politics and spirituality. But this is precisely
what writer-director Andy Hamilton (Drop the Dead Donkey and
Bedtime) sets out to do in his latest offering, Trevor's
World of Sports.

Based around the life of Trevor Heslop, played by Neil Pearson
(also of Drop the Dead Donkey), and TS Sports Stars, the
agency he runs with partner Sammy Dobbs (Paul Reynolds), the drama
melds the cut-throat world of commercialised sport with an unlikely
cast of quirky characters: a formula one driver prone to
hallucinations, a god-fearing office manager, a lesbian
receptionist from Germany and a psychiatrist hired to evaluate the
behaviour of the agency's egomaniac clients.

For Pearson, it was precisely this quirkiness that attracted him
to the role. "The part appealed on a number of levels. Andy and I
are both sports fans, and there was a bit of comedy - a perfect
marriage. But it's really Andy's ability to texture his ideas and
make his characters live in a world that's very recognisable to his
audience that is unique. Trevor may be a sports agent but he's also
a fully developed, well-rounded human being with problems at work,
problems at home."

The idea to base the drama around a sports agent came, says
Pearson, from Hamilton observing the meteoric rise to fame of
sports agents over the past few years. "Until very recently this
area had been a completely closed book. Then suddenly they (agents)
began to become 'almost-starts' in their own right; they appeared
in magazines, their public profile went up. It's as if anyone who
makes big money is a star. It doesn't matter how you make the
money, just that if you do that makes you interesting."

To research life in the world of commercialised sport, Hamilton
took technical advice from real-life agent Jon Holmes, whose
clients includes England footballer Steven Gerrard and England
cricket captain Nasser Hussein. He also recruited a team of sports
stars, some of whom, including Pat Cash, appear throughout the
series in guest cameo roles.

Despite receiving critical acclaim when it was first screened by
the BBC, scheduling problems resulted in the show being dropped
amid falling ratings. The second series has, however, been picked
up by Radio 4 and turned into a radio drama. Pearson maintains that
the BBC "treated the show very badly", but cites a change in the
nature of broadcasting culture as the central problem.

"We're in an age where success is quantified by ratings,
immediate ratings. This was a show that was always going to need
time to build an audience. Take a show like Fools and Horses
- the first two series, nobody watched it. But the BBC had faith in
it, nurtured it, it found an audience and then it exploded. Now
it's a national institution. You don't have time to do that now,
and as a result, a show like Trevor's World of Sports
suffers."